New Year's resolutions

WorldNetDaily contributor Linda Bowles is a
nationally syndicated columnist. She and her husband, Warren, have one
daughter, Michelle, and live on a ranch situated on the western slope of
the California Sierras.

Resolutions for the new year are about correcting sins of omission
and commission. The basic idea is to make lists of our intentions to
begin doing certain things we should have been doing, but weren’t, and
to stop doing certain other things we should not have been doing, but
were.

This is a good thing to do. Nobody is perfect. So, in the spirit of
the season, I will confess that during the last eight grueling years, I
wrote a few unkind things about various people and groups. I wince when
I remind myself of what I have done, but true repentance requires
complete candor.

In that spirit, I must confess to having written bad things about
various liberal heroes and icons. For example, I mischievously said of
our statuesque vice president that his artificiality suggests he is not
wooden as many contend, but plastic, and therefore a non-biodegradable
menace to the political environment.

I called Bill Clinton “Beelzabubba.” I said he was an “energized
bunny chaser.” On one occasion, I described him as Bill “I never dropped
my pants” Clinton. I called him a scalawag, boll weevil, Southern
confederate. In the same venomous vein I wrote shamelessly about Kweisi
“Boo Hoo” Mfume, Rep. David “I am dyspeptic” Bonior, and George
“man-child” Poppycockopoulos.

I wince when I think about having described Hillary Clinton as “a
ferocious, left-wing, radical warrior-woman, with a face of chiseled
grit, and a burning passion to become the Great Emasculator” who
occasionally transmogrified into a “frilly and frumpy housewife with a
cookie cutter, gazing up at her husband with a look of dopey adoration.”

It was insufferable of me to refer to Clinton’s cabinet as a freak
sideshow, featuring a giant bearded lady, a couple of midgets, an array
of bumbling Babbits, and cabinet clown, Jocelyn Elders.

I was unkind to whole classes of people. I was particularly unkind to
liberals. I wrote that “although they look and sound alike when they are
snowing the public, in fact no two liberal flakes are alike.” I said
liberals were so open-minded their brains fell out. I said liberalism
was a disease, probably genetic, and apparently incurable. All of these
were wince worthy.

I gave the Democratic Party some bold advice: I wrote, “You have an
image of unmanliness. Overcome your terror of guns, your loathing of the
military and your heterophobia. Fake it, if necessary.”

I advised Democratic party leaders to “Stop whining. But if you must
whine, find some women to do it. It is unbecoming to see men pout and
complain. This is women’s work; we are better at it. The Democratic
party is full of girls who have perfected the art of the nag, for
example Barbara Boxer, Maxine Waters, Barbara Mikulski and Barney
Frank.”

I said that historians would describe the Clinton administration not
as a sea change in American politics, but as a toilet flush. I
recommended we should round up all the people who voted for Bill Clinton
and arrest them for committing a hate crime against America.

None of this was nice. The frothy, teeth-gnashing, apoplectic
responses evoked by my commentaries helped me understand that I had not
succeeded in bringing out the best in all my readers. I know it now. I
know it because I am in receipt of a basketful of mean-spirited, uncivil
letters from outraged readers who demand that I stop being so
outrageously mean-spirited and uncivil. I winced when I first read these
letters. I am still wincing. I can take a hint.

In the future I want to be more empathetic toward the people who
disagree with me, however disagreeably they do it, and more indulgent of
the ideas, however loony, with which they are afflicted. If the two
journalistic giants George Will and William Buckley can take the heat
for on the one hand being boring and on the other being
incomprehensible, surely I can withstand a few barbs and death threats
without wincing.

Therefore, I, Linda Bowles, being of conservative mind and body, do
hereby make the following resolutions for 2001. I solemnly resolve to:

Write a thank you note to Bill Clinton for enabling the
Republican Party to take control of the House of Representatives, the
U.S. Senate, and the presidency.

Write a thank you note to Pat Buchanan for effectively destroying
the Reform Party and enabling George W. Bush to become president of the
United States.

Ask Attorney General John Ashcroft to determine whether the laws
which prevent criminals from profiting from their crimes will apply to
Hillary’s book deal.